Office devices have increased the efficiency of the modern office and increased the productivity of office staffs, through an increase in the functions that these devices can perform. Technical advances in office devices have enabled the devices to handle a variety of media types for processing different types of print jobs.
Typically, a person using a networked office device to process a print job loads special media, and hopes someone else with access to the networked office device does not accidentally print on the special media. Expensive special media may be wasted by accidentally printing a print job on special media, when the print job does not require special media. Accordingly, a user attempting to print on special media may attempt to hover over an office device and make sure that the wrong print job is not printed on the special media. Manually intercepting print jobs at the office device may not be very effective, especially where it is difficult to determine whether the print job is the wrong print job until it is too late. Additionally, if the person does not have a network workstation close to the office device the logistics of this manual intercept method may prove difficult.
In some office devices, a user may lock-out access to the office device control panel. This lock-out can be useful to prevent other users from changing the settings of the office device. However, if the device remains online and accepting print jobs, this may not prevent accidental waste of special media, as described above. On the other hand, uniformly preventing other users from printing jobs may cause significant down time, and thus may significantly limit the office device resources available to other users of the office device.